C

Looking through an old S/370 Assembly book and found a C program I wrote a long time ago. One of the few I’ve written, I certainly don’t consider myself a C programmer. Don’t know why I didn’t get into it more. It’s certainly a great and important language. There’s no date on the listing but it’s printed on a dot matrix printer on fanfold paper…so pretty old.

NextCloud update…finally!

Finally got option to update NextCloud to 17 (actually 17.0.1)…and did. Version 17 has been out for a while but never offered to me. Was very concerned because of the NextCry Ransomware issue found in the wild. Seem to apply to NGINX web servers…still very annoying for my NextCloud to keep telling me that my software was current at 16…week after many weeks!

IBM COBOL program fix

Fixed sort04.cob amounts and arithmetic on those fields after figuring out how…again, how IBM COBOL works with these fields. It was working but not displaying amount fields and I had left it that way until I understood why. By working I mean producing output and running to completion. So I guess I should really say it wasn’t working properly. Should have created data with proper amounts. Processing would have been easier by not including decimal in data so 01095 instead of 010.95. But it’s been many years since working with IBM COBOL. I think it wasn’t a problem with gnuCOBOL since this was a port of that source!

COBOL numeric fields

I mentioned here something odd and confusing to me. So played with it and certainly can work around it. However I still find it strange that in IBM COBOL, at least this very old version, I can’t move a field defined as 999.99 to another field defined as 999.99. I guess the answer simply is that’s the rule. This is a very old compiler, so as far as I know it may not even work this way any more.

IMSAI 8080

Got the IMSAI 8080 emulator working. The computer came out in 1975 and was a clone of the MITS Altair 8800 that came out prior. My log/blog 1st entry shows the Jan. 1975 Popular Electronics cover with the Altair. They labeled it the 1st minicomputer kit because the term microcomputer hadn’t yet been coined. It predates the Apple & TRS-80. Microsoft was created by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and who sold their Altair Basic to MITS, their first customer.

I think the reason I have a fondness for this computer is that front panel resembles the DEC PDP-11 series of computers I used early in my career, that also had a front panel of switches that you toggled to bootstrap the OS…RSTS/E in my case. The IMSAI 8080 was also Matthew Broderick’s computer in the 1983 movie WarGames in which the question was asked…Do you want to play a game? And he almost set off Thermonuclear War. Very cool how you can toggle the switches and spin the screen replica in 3-D. Booted CP/M 1.3. Basically it looks like the YouTube demo, from the creator Udo Munk. I created a very short video that doesn’t really add anything to what’s already out there but it’s larger than many and the picture becomes very clear after 20 seconds. More info about the emulator here.

Backup NextCloud server

Used rsync to backup my personal files on my NextCloud server. However it appears it just backed up everything again, because the file all timestamps were today. For as long as I have been using Linux, I should know how to use rsync better,. Did some research and think I found solution…maybe

rsync –update -raz –progress ‘/home/myfiles…/’ ‘/media/sdb1/’.

However it just ended (return to prompt), with no final summary that I’ve seen before?

More greenbar?

Even though I said this wasn’t a high priority, I did some more work on my greenbar program. Seems to do a pretty fair job. Not exactly an example of my finest programming skills. A lot of trial and error rather than properly understanding the process. I think I understood it better a few years ago when I 1st started playing with it. Anywho…I’m looking to capture more of the nostalgic feel rather than an exact precision duplication of a greenbar listing. I think I did a pretty fair job. Probably needs more tractor holes among many other things. Works on the Hercules local prt file prt00e.txt AND GnuCOBOL files, especially when compiled with GnuCOBOL’s xref switch…looks very IBMish!

Here’s a GnuCOBOL example printed on the famous orange bar paper, so popular in IBM computer shops, for the fall season! Just kidding…no such paper as far as I know : )

Python virtual environment

Used Python virtual environment for the 1st time. It seems that none of the documented way to do this was an exact fit for me…odd. Seemed like a good way to try out the new version of the reportlab PDF module and also add the PyPDF2 module to get rid of the first blank page. Seemed to work well once I figured out I had to run (in my virtual environment) my program like ‘python3 program_name.py and not ./program_name.py (which ran the non virtual program).